We process our payments using a company called Stripe, which provides amazing services and is one of those unicorn companies that you hear about.
When you provide your credit card number at OpaVote, we never see it. It goes directly from your browser to Stripe, and then Stripe processes it for us. Processing credit card numbers is serious business so we let Stripe handle that for us.
Saving of Credit Card Info
You can now save your credit card info so that you don't need to enter it for each payment. For those of you running many elections, this will save you the trouble of having to repeatedly enter your credit card info.
Pay on Start Voting
Previously, you had to make a payment to OpaVote to add to your account balance, and we would then use your account balance when you started an election that required payment.
To make it easier, we now allow you to provide your payment info when you click on the Start Voting button. The dialog above is used when you click Start Voting to import upon you the seriousness of starting an election. We've updated this dialog to allow you to enter your payment info there so that you don't need to go to a different page to make a payment.
When you enter your credit card info, we'll charge the needed amount to your card and then start the election.
OpaVote Account Balances Still Available
You can still add money to your OpaVote account balance from our payments page. This may be especially helpful for people who do not want to store their credit card info with us. For example, if you are running 10 elections that cost $10 each, you can make a payment of $100 to your balance, and we will automatically deduct $10 from your balance for each election that you start.
If you have a balance, then we will always use that first. For example, if you have a balance of $10 and your election costs $20, then we will apply your balance and only charge $10 to your card.
If you are not able to make payments via credit card and need to make payments in another way, please contact us and we'll do our best to help you. Stripe supports many payment options so we can hopefully find one that works for you.